You have to be some optimist if you believe that Silverlight has any future in the new Microsoft, but it is still interesting if sad to watch as the edifice is taken down. The news today is that the Silverlight-specific website has been removed and all we have now is a mess of broken links.

Silverlight.net, which used to be the central information point for Silverlight, has been redirected to an MSDN page. You can find some of the content at the new page, but not all of it and any links that you might have saved seem to be mostly broken.

The fact that the product-specific URL has been decommissioned is most likely another reflection of the political shifts within Microsoft. Many product teams set up their own sites, separate from the main Microsoft.com URL, and proceeded to do things in their own way. The reabsorption of the Silverlight site is a natural consequence of the lack of interest in the future of the product. Even the Silverlight blog has been populated by articles on XAML and non-Silverlight topics for some months - my guess is it too will soon vanish.

Now only the far flung reaches of Microsoft, such as Microsoft Research, still make use of Silverlight for new projects. The last major niche for Silverlight is as a legacy application running on Windows Phone 8. You can run a Silverlight app but you can't develop it further and you can't start a new Silverlight app. Microsoft must be hoping that all those Silverlight-delivered videos go the same way as Silverlight.net very soon.

Of course Silverlight will be around on the Windows desktop and in IE for sometime, but it is a very real and uncomfortable lesson in adopting such proprietary technologies - but as long as Windows is still the most common operating system we usually don't have a choice.

For a set of complex reasons, the final scene is being played out in the life of the Flash and Java add-ins. Many users are celebrating with cries of "good" and "the only thing Adobe can do to fix it [ ... ]